Two for One

Isabel and Ruben Toledo: a marriage that wears well.

The Toledos at home. The clothes are by Isabel; the art work is by Ruben. Photograph by Max Vadukul.

There are some clothes, like cars, that pique your curiosity, and you just have to know (or, if you are a child of the quiz-show era, to show off by guessing) their make and model. About ten years ago, I startled a grande dame by asking her if the cocktail dress she was wearing, hands down the chicest in the room, wasn’t a Dior, from 1948. It looked perfectly contemporary, but Dior did some of his greatest work in the same fabric: a glossy, malleable black satin that held its shape like meringue. “Yes,” she admitted, “but please don’t tell anyone that I’ve been wearing it for half a century.”

Not long afterward, at a party downtown, I saw another black dress, which was equally worthy of reverence, but this one I couldn’t place, even after I had examined it from every angle. It belonged to a youthful woman who carried herself without the sense of preciousness that often marks a couture client like the grande dame. The material was unpretentious—cotton or rayon matte jersey—so not couture, I thought, yet like couture the cut had a mandarin inscrutability. Softly pleated, overlapping swags fell from the shoulders and were molded to the body like the leaves of a corn husk, tapering to a narrow V that should have hobbled the woman’s ankles, but she moved gracefully. I was just about to tap her on the shoulder when she turned and, reading my intentions with a look of amusement, uttered two words: “Isabel Toledo.”

My first encounter with Toledo’s work was an upscale parody of a commercial that fashion lovers of a certain age will remember. The commercial—for the Anne Klein budget line, Anne Klein II—ran in the nineteen-eighties and made a deeper impression than the sportswear it advertised. There were several spots, all a version of the same scenario. In one, a handsome cowboy notices a cool, urbanlooking woman in a fast car who has stopped to make a phone call at a gas station. As she strides toward the booth with a jacket tossed over her shoulders, then juggles her Filofax with the receiver, she catches the cowboy sizing her up but pays no attention. He seems mystified, as much by his own attraction as by her independence. (That wishful notion—that independence is attractive to he-men—lives on as a plot staple of cable television.) Just as he is mustering the courage to address her, she utters three words: “Anne Klein II.”

In 2006, Isabel Toledo, of all people, was hired as the creative director of Anne Klein. She has always been her own woman, so the choice seemed apt demographically, if for no other reason. But Anne Klein makes clothing for the office and for suburban weekends, and is sold largely in malls, whereas Toledo, a forty-seven-year-old, Cuban-born avant-gardist, is virtually unknown outside the fashion world, and initiates speak of her talent with the kind of awe generally reserved for a chess prodigy. She is often mentioned with Geoffrey Beene and Charles James as a designer’s designer, someone whose cutting has an ingenious rigor not obvious to a layman. “I think one can fairly call Isabel a genius,” Valerie Steele told me recently. (Steele, the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, is planning to give Toledo a “mid-career” retrospective in 2009.) “She has an ability to do the kind of spatial modelling in her head that a computer does. By pulling a drawstring through the fabric, or folding it like origami, though also using more conventional techniques—seaming and draping—in innovative ways, she transforms a geometric plane into a poetic volume that you couldn’t have imagined.” (Toledo has described her craft as “romantic mathematics.”)

Toledo’s surprise appointment to her position at Anne Klein, and her abrupt dismissal from it, one year and three well-received collections later, got more press than her own line has ever generated. She has worked outside the mainstream, without much fanfare or capital (yet always with the interest of an élite—she won a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in 2005), for the past quarter of a century, and her longevity in a fickle business that eats its young and abandons its old on the ice floes of oblivion is a rare feat. “Maybe I’ve survived because I’m not a fashion person,” she told me. “I don’t like the disposable culture fashion feeds into—I see myself as a maker of great hand-me-downs. Objects or clothes last because they function, and because you’ve found the most rational solution to a design problem.” (Despite her beauty—huge eyes in a pale, angular face with a regal forehead—Toledo doesn’t look much like a fashion person, either, or, at least, not in her working uniform: a pair of clogs, white carpenter pants, and a sweater, with her old-fashioned hair cascading down her back like the tresses of a Gothic Magdalene from Galicia, where her mother’s family originated.)

Since 1984, when she opened her house, working out of a tenement next to the Port Authority and doing all the sewing herself, Toledo has been married to her business partner, Ruben Toledo, an artist, set designer, filmmaker, and one of the fashion world’s leading illustrators. (In the introduction to “Style Dictionary,” Ruben’s affectionately scathing cartoon glossary of fashion’s absurdities, Richard Martin, the late curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, compared his work to the caricatures of Daumier and Grandville.)

The Toledos are an inseparable couple—a collective of two. He is the impetuous, outgoing one, a wiry man with a trim mustache who cuts the figure of a bohemian dandy and does most of the talking. They have a long lease on four floors of a loft building in the flower district, which houses her workrooms, and they live upstairs, in a garret penthouse they renovated on the cheap, fifteen years ago. A dining room, furnished with a marble drafting table at which they eat and work, opens onto a listing balcony that overlooks a former lithography studio. They sleep on a mezzanine, under a ceiling splotched by a century of water stains—yellow scabs that sometimes reopen. Ruben covered two of the walls with a graffiti-like frieze of faces. The décor is, as he puts it, “a crazy quilt” of found objects—puppets, a birdcage, hula hoops—some hanging from the rafters. A cactus from Woolworth’s is now, thanks to Isabel’s “insane green thumb,” fifteen feet tall. Friends contributed eccentric furniture, and, surrounded by art books, canvases, and stylized dress forms that Ruben designs for Pucci Mannequins (including the refreshingly well-padded “Birdie”—38-32-44), a woodwormridden Buddha sits on an odd-shaped table. A week before Christmas, the drafts rattling the safety glass of a big skylight in the main room, which frames a view of the Empire State Building, were so icy that I asked Isabel to lend me a sweater— the Toledos sometimes have to wear the matching ski suits that hang on pegs in the bathroom. She does the cooking in a tiny alcove, and he brews the Cuban coffee. They have Sunday brunch together, lingering over it for hours, and at night, if they don’t feel like going out, Ruben said, “we put some cha-cha or rumba music on and boogie around by ourselves. We’re both great dancers.”

Ruben’s well-paid commercial art has seen them through hard times, and, in the beginning, he did the cutting for her designs, pressed the samples, and delivered the orders by taxi to the few outlets in Manhattan—Bendel’s, uptown, and Patricia Field, on East Eighth Street—that were adventurous enough to carry them. The Toledos are no longer struggling artists (although the romantic ethos of authenticity and creative struggle is part of their identity), but they still operate on an artisanal scale. Their company employs about a dozen people, most of them Chinese—former sweatshop workers whom Toledo retrains—and a few brainy interns, generally from the top of their classes at Parsons or F.I.T. When Isabel has puzzled out a design in her head, she describes it to Ruben, mostly with gestures, and he does sketches that their part-time pattern cutters translate into muslins. Three times a week, Ruben’s eighty-year-old father, Vitellio, a retired tailor who once had a carriage-trade clientele in Old Havana, comes in from New Jersey to help. (On the morning I met Señor Toledo, he arrived with a neatly wrapped “present” for Isabel—the lid of her pressure cooker, which he had taken home to repair.) “We’re like a big family,” Ruben said, “and to work here you have to be comfortable as part of an organism.” This cozy hive can produce, at most, only three hundred pieces a season, which are retailed at Barneys, in New York; Ikram, in Chicago; Nordstrom, in Dallas; Colette, in Paris; Joyce, in Hong Kong; and a few other high-end department stores.

The Toledo boutique at Barneys consists of a rack or two opposite the up escalator on the second floor (where Prada and Lanvin occupy the corner salons). On a recent visit, four big drawings by Ruben and a few samples from Isabel’s minuscule 2008 Cruise collection were on display. An ingénue’s charming dance frock with a fifties silhouette was sprinkled with embroidered pinwheels, in peppery colors, and it came with a little bolero that tied under the bosom. For a more classical taste, there were a couple of modern chitons—soft dresses with Grecian pleating, a Toledo signature—in pewter or black rayon jersey, which you could wear barefoot or to lunch at the George V. The most striking piece was one of Toledo’s future great hand-me-downs. It was a short, champagne-colored gown with a fitted waist and a full skirt, constructed entirely of narrow, hand-shirred silk bands seamed into tiers. That kind of demi-couture is not for the bargain hunter, and Toledo’s prices range from twelve hundred dollars to ten thousand (for a “coat of armor” in metallic lace). But Julie Gilhart, Barneys’ fashion director, told me that the line reliably sells out almost as soon as it appears. “Most of my clientele,” Isabel said wryly, but without resentment, “seems to be manufacturers buying the clothes to copy.”

The Toledos reckon that in twenty-four years of marriage they have spent, at most, a week apart—when he flew to Japan, ahead of her, for a “fashion opera” whose sets he had designed. As photogenic newlyweds who were fixtures of the downtown club scene and at Studio 54, they gave an interview to Paper magazine in which they expressed their desire to have “ten children as soon as possible.” They have never had any. (“Not yet,” Isabel said, when I asked them about it, to which Ruben objected, with some alarm, “I don’t want to share you.”) But they are so enmeshed with each other that it’s hard to imagine them making the compromises, or dividing the prosaic labors, of parenthood. “I think we don’t know which one of us is which,” she admitted.

It’s obvious, however, that their differences are part of their chemistry. Ruben, who was born in Cuba a year after Isabel, described himself as “a typical street-smart Havana mutt for whom anything goes, while the Spanish side of Isabel loves rules and order.” He is “a pack rat,” and she hates clutter. His extroverted, Latin gallantry leaves one with a first impression that she, by contrast, is profoundly shy, and even friends call her “unreadable.” But her reticence is of a piece with her economy as a designer, and in both cases she has plenty to say, especially to her husband. They go back and forth about art and life, debating how alike and unalike they are, as if they were exploring the paradoxes of a thrilling new acquaintance. “We always know we can get through to each other,” she said, “and that’s so sexy.” He paints her obsessively (“It’s really because I’m always handy”), and their symmetry as a dyad appeals to photographers, among them Karl Lagerfeld. He posed them on giant stools for a portrait that appeared in the catalogue of a joint exhibition in 2000, at the Kent State University Museum. They are about the same height—five and a half feet; both slight and dark (one of their oldest friends, Joey Arias, the performance artist and drag star, describes them as “salt and pepper shakers”); and their weights in the marriage also seem evenly balanced.

West New York, New Jersey, where the Toledos grew up, was a blue-collar barrio with a vibrant Latin culture where thousands of Cuban exiles settled in the nineteen-sixties. Ruben’s family arrived on a “freedom flight,” in 1967, and he still recalls the white cowboy boots and leopard-skin jacket that he was given by the Salvation Army. “They were my first American clothes, and when everyone stared at me I thought it was because I looked so cool,” he said. Isabel’s father, Felix Izquierdo, who bore a striking resemblance to Clark Gable (he died three weeks before her wedding), was born in Cuba to parents from the Canary Islands. He went to work, at twelve, as a clerk in a hardware store whose owners eventually gave him a share in the business. He lost it when he emigrated, and took a job operating knitting machines in a textile factory. Eventually, he scraped together enough money to open a clothing shop in Union City. “I loved the no-nonsense way my father dressed,” Isabel said. “Menswear has such authority. The only clothes that I ever wear, besides my own, are Ruben’s.”

Bertha Izquierdo, Isabel’s mother, had once been employed at a rich uncle’s shoe factory in Camajuani (the provincial town where Isabel was born), selecting leathers. “Cuban women didn’t work outside the home, but she wanted to,” Ruben said. “It was a modern family, unlike mine, and it seemed like an ideal family, unlike mine—we’re solitary people who love each other but fight a lot—and Bertha played the catcher on a women’s baseball team.” (Spherical skirts or sleeves, seamed with contrasting thread, like a baseball, are among Toledo’s leitmotifs.) Isabel recalls an idyllic early childhood in an extended family. Even after the revolution, her resourceful mother managed to dress her three daughters—Isabel is the youngest—“like little princesses.” But when they started over, in New Jersey, in 1968, Bertha also got a factory job, assembling airplaneignition parts, and the girls were sent to a babysitter after school. “I’ve always been bull-headed,” Isabel told me, “and I refused to go. So my mother had to bribe me with the promise of sewing lessons.” At first, she practiced on little pillows or stuffed animals, but soon she started sewing for herself. “I was always so skinny that I hated shopping,” she said. She often stayed up late into the night making her school clothes, and she also sewed for her sisters. Ruben recalled seeing one of the Izquierdo girls, whom he didn’t yet know, at a local dance hall wearing “an amazing dress of white gauze that everyone admired.” It was the era of “Saturday Night Fever,” and the dress came from a store-bought pattern that Isabel had reworked. Even at the babysitter’s kitchen table, she was engrossed by laying out a pattern. It wasn’t merely the paper-doll template for a cute outfit or a toy but an abstract puzzle whose multiple solutions were governed, like music, by mysterious laws.

Having met her dress before he met Isabel, Ruben found himself sitting near her in a ninth-grade Spanish class. He was thirteen and she was fourteen, and for him “it was love at first sight.” But one afternoon, when Isabel and I were, exceptionally, by ourselves, she told me, “I was a wild girl at that age, wild but innocent. All I cared about was getting dressed up and going dancing. I figured out how to get rides into the city with older boys from the neighborhood, who were glad to take me, because I had the ‘look’ you needed to get into the clubs—a cross between Lolita and Keith Richards.” Hoping to calm her down a bit, Isabel’s father got her a summer job in a bridal shop. There was a rush order to fill, and she helped out with the bridesmaids’ dresses. “But when they were finished I quit, and I wouldn’t take any money, which the owner couldn’t understand,” she said. “By then, I knew that sewing was my vocation, though not that kind of sewing, and I was afraid of being trapped, for life, catering to Bridezillas. That’s pretty funny,” she concluded, “because catering to Bridezillas in one form or another is the fate of most designers.”

Ruben, in the meantime, contrived to fail both Spanish and art, his mother tongues. “That’s because you were already an artist,” Isabel said, but she also suggested that his “crush” on her had played a part. “Please don’t insult me by calling it a crush,” he retorted. “True love isn’t a ‘crush,’ as time has proved.”

They started dating when they finished high school, and if Toledo’s work had a narrative—which it doesn’t, she said vehemently: “I don’t need images or fantasy to express emotion through design”—it would surely be that of their romance.

Like their parents, Ruben and Isabel were driven by a desire to assimilate. “That’s what makes our work so American,” he said. After a semester at the School of Visual Arts, he dropped out and sold used cars, hung out at the Mudd Club, met Andy Warhol, Klaus Nomi, Keith Haring, and other “not great models for good behavior,” and eventually got a job as a salesman at Parachute, an edgy boutique in SoHo. (By that time, he was supplementing his income by selling photographs of Isabel, colored with food dye, to the postcard buyer at Fiorucci.) Joey Arias and Kim Hastreiter, the editor of Paper, used to drop by. They both remember Ruben talking non-stop about his beautiful girlfriend. Isabel, in the meantime, enrolled at F.I.T., then transferred to Parsons. She dressed for the clubs in bubbles of tulle with fishing-wire straps, and “wearable sculptures” of pulled thread. But in 1979 she quit her studies for a chance to intern with Diana Vreeland at the Met’s Costume Institute. “Mrs. Vreeland was fascinated by Isabel’s footwear,” Ruben noted. “One day she’d be wearing combat boots, and the next granny shoes.”

Conservation was not yet the esoteric province of experts in hazmat suits that it has become, and Isabel had few credentials beyond her gifts as a seamstress. She began by working on the institute’s old buckram dress forms, reshaping them with cotton batting and surgical mesh, but one day she was handed a gown by Madame Grès that had started to tear, and was told to mend it. “The name meant nothing to me,” she said. “I had no idea who all these mythic figures were. I looked at the technique, not at the label, and figured out, from the structure, how it should be repaired. Couture is a language, and I learned it the way a child does, by immersion. Another time, I was restoring a Vionnet, and when I turned it inside out, and saw the seams, I thought, Wow. I knew that the curators were wrong about it. It wasn’t, as they said, the bias cut that gave it its shape, but the weight of the fabric.”

Toledo spent five years at the Met, which were in essence an apprenticeship with the twentieth century’s greatest couturiers. In 1985, during Fall Fashion Week, she mounted her first runway show for buyers and the press. (She had been selling her creations on consignment at Fiorucci, and her “pre-collections”—part of chaotic spectacles at Danceteria, where Joey Arias hosted a monthly revue called “Mermaids on Heroin”—had won her an underground following.) At her official début, Toledo presented a collection pieced together from denim wedges in primary colors, which caused a stir and made the windows at Bergdorf’s. Harold Koda, who had worked at the Costume Institute as an exhibition assistant when Isabel was an intern (he is now the chief curator), was in the audience. “Isabel’s early work challenged the notion of what clothing could be,” he said. “She wasn’t a militant, like Rei Kawakubo, but her approach struck me as aggressively conceptual in that it asserted the primacy of the pattern over the garment. I have always loved the purity of her ideas—nothing she does is superficial—and her clothes are fascinating as design objects. But, as the artist evolved and the woman matured, she invested the clothes with a cryptic sensuality in which, I think, you can read Ruben’s influence, and that of their marriage. I still remember a dystopian-looking but very beautiful cocoon jacket of rusty-brown organza—the color of a cockroach—lined with what seemed to be the filter of an air-conditioner. It was constructed like a T-shirt pulled over the head backward, and it reminded me of late Balenciaga.”

Toledo says that she doesn’t channel other designers, though her admirers tend to invoke canonical figures in making a case for her place in the pantheon (besides Charles James, Geoffrey Beene, Vionnet, Claire McCardell, and Bonnie Cashin, contemporaries like Alber Elbaz, of Lanvin, and Azzedine Alaïa are frequently mentioned). “In terms of invention and of blurring the boundaries between art and fashion, Isabel is like a modern-day Schiaparelli,” Kim Hastreiter said. Compared with Schiaparelli, a stormy, protean figure who enriched the vocabulary of fashion more than any of her peers, Toledo is, or still is, a minor—and democratic—deity who doesn’t seek to dictate the way women should live.

Yet she, too, has a mischievous side, and has always enjoyed testing the limits of what clothing can be. In 1988, she created the “Packing Dress,” a flat, white circle with four holes—for the legs, arms, and head. (On the body, it resembles a Surrealist lampshade.) Ten years later, at one of her last runway shows (their expense, in relation to the business they generated, had become prohibitive), she unveiled the “Hermaphrodite,” an ethereal confection of droopy pouches, in topaz chiffon, lashed with bias tape, which can be turned inside or out, suggesting either an orifice or an appendage, depending on your hormone levels that evening. (“When you wear something for the first time,” Isabel said, “it should surprise you with a rush of feeling you weren’t expecting”—the ephemeral feeling, perhaps, of being happy with yourself.) But her archives are also full of deceptively straight-looking lace and ruffles; ladylike shirtwaists with a New Look flare; minimalist sheaths cut on the bias; and dress-and-coat ensembles in lavish brocade that flirt with propriety, or even with mumsiness, until you perceive the ironic detail that subverts them. As a woman designer (and her own guinea pig), Toledo thinks about body parts—and flaws—that a man might overlook. “I have a pointy chin,” she said, “so sharp lapels make me look witchy if they’re not set properly.” I have a dictator’s jaw, so I was very surprised that when I put on a gendarme coat of rubberized silk (it looked like the skin of a wet otter), with a high collar, which Toledo designed at Anne Klein, you would not have mistaken me for Mussolini.

The announcement that Toledo had been hired to create some excitement at Anne Klein heartened the professionals who considered her the rightful heir of Cashin and McCardell—women with an original perspective on American style in a landscape dominated by male designers, many of whom are, today, boy wunderkinds. Anne Klein herself was more of a trendsetter than an artist, but she sensed the nascent feminism of a new generation. A former sketcher on Seventh Avenue, who founded the company in 1968, she liked to say that “clothes aren’t going to change the world, the women who wear them will.” She dressed the baby boomers just then beginning to enter the workforce in separates that they could “mix and match”—a novel concept for the time. In 1974, when Klein died of breast cancer, at fifty-one, Donna Karan inherited her mantle and wore it for a decade with panache. (She and her old schoolmate Louis dell’Olio did much of the work on Anne Klein II.) Karan left the year that the Toledos went into business, and, under a series of successors, the brand fell into the doldrums.

Shortly before Toledo joined Anne Klein, its parent company, Jones Apparel, a conglomerate with five billion dollars a year in sales, had been looking for a buyer or for bids from private-equity firms, but had received a low valuation from analysts. The chief executive, Peter Boneparth, was betting that he could reinvigorate a sluggish corporate metabolism from the top down with an injection of charisma. “It wasn’t about getting the name who was the biggest,” he told the Times, “but the person who had the best perceived talent”—perceived, that is, by the fashion press (which helped to build suspense for Toledo’s début) rather than by the moneymen. At her first outing, Fall-Winter 2007, she showed clashing plaids in a smart walking suit, and mixed chunky knits with fluid trousers. There was a confident swagger to the leather and charmeuse. Even though the clothes were designed for production in China (“I was expected to pick out the buttons before I had thought about the clothes,” Toledo said) and she adapted her standards of tailoring to a mass market, some critics felt that the collection fell short of the revelation they had been expecting, or that it was too cerebral for the target audience. “The Anne Klein lady wants a nice red blazer,” an industry expert told me, “but a customer for Isabel’s clothes has to be literate in fashion to read their subtlety, and even then it’s only fully apparent in a dressing room.” As Koda noted, “There is sometimes a tongue-in-cheek primness to Isabel’s work—the sex appeal isn’t explicit.” For the sort of woman who dresses at Gucci, or even at Donna Karan, the spirit of the clothes was probably a bit too impeccable. But for Spring 2007 Toledo let her hair down. Ruben hand-painted a bouquet of gossamer shirtwaists, and transparent layers drifted down the runway like a cloud of milkweed on a June day. You could feel a collective surge of appetite from the front row, and the bees and butterflies left buzzing.

Just as Spring was being shipped, and it seemed that a well-loved Cinderella, superior to her rivals yet toiling in obscurity, had been liberated, Jones backed out, without notice or explanation. A corporate shakeup had ousted Boneparth (the terms of his separation agreement do not permit him to comment, he told me), and a new management team, headed by Wesley Card (who declined to answer any questions but issued a two-line statement through a publicist praising Isabel’s “amazing talent”), apparently balked at the commitment necessary to launch a designer with far-reaching ambitions—especially one whom it hadn’t hired—and decided, in a dismal retail climate, to focus on lower-end brands. Toledo is officially still under contract to Anne Klein, and she won’t be at liberty until next year to discuss her experience, except to say that she’s “sad and disappointed, and we brought some of our best technicians to Anne Klein, but we’re regrouping.”

At one of our last meetings, the Toledos and I went out for lunch at a French bistro near their loft building. (Ruben does an excellent imitation of wounded macho pride if a woman reaches for the check.) It was raining, and I saw that Isabel was staring intently at the umbrellas in a stand near our table. I asked her why. “If you had never seen an umbrella,” she said, “and you had no idea what it was for—if it just looked like a dying lily—could you imagine its shape open?” ♦

Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 2000.